Category Archives: Nature

Fantastic Fungi Part 2 – Cleaning Up the Mess

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As well as their primary roles in the creation and growth of plants, and thus life on earth, fungi have also been key in destroying plant material, acting as the decomposers of dead and dying organisms, transforming them to move nutrients back into the cycle of life. Without them the build-up of dead plant and animal matter would choke the earth.

You can see the evidence of this in my little patch of forest at the end of the road. As I look at the forest floor, I see that nowhere is it flat, it is entirely built on this process of decomposition. The ground is uneven and bumpy, and everywhere there are fallen trees and limbs littering the floor, decomposing and shrinking back down to become, over time, the soil that then is the base for new growth. Look closely and you see large trees growing out of the remains of long-fallen ancestors. Fungi plays a key role in this and on a broader scale throughout time have been responsible for literally shaping the surface of the planet.

MYCOREMEDIATION

Fungi break down organic material through enzymatic reactions – as mycelium speads it secretes enzymes that can transform even the toughest of materials. Not only that, they have proven their adaptability over hundreds of millions of years, responding to all kinds of different environments. They have survived previous mass extinctions to emerge as a force that remains to rejuvenate and transform changed environments over time.

Scientists have turned their attention to seeing how this process can be encouraged in other ways, perhaps in cleaning up the messes made by human industrial life. They call it mycoremediation which refers to using fungi to deliberately remove waste from the environment – capitalizing on their natural role as the earth’s original recyclers. The scientific imagination looks towards seeing how certain fungi decomposers will react when put in contact with some of the more intractable pollutants resulting from our industrial societies – oil spills, toxic mining byproducts, soil and water pollution and plastic waste. They ask if and how the fungi’s natural roles in breaking the hydrocarbon bonds in matter can be harnessed to deal with the real gnarly stuff.

Here are just some of the examples of experiments testing how fungi may be used in these ways:

  • Removing contaminants from water sources – lab based studies have successfully shown the capacity of fungi mycelium to remove e. coli from polluted water from the Chicago River. Mycelium has been tested to restore habitat by filtering contaminated water run-off from farms, while releasing enzymes that degrade toxic contaminants. Experiments on toxic ash residue from California wildfires used hay bales full of oyster mushroom mycelium to clear heavy metals and other toxins from water sources in the damaged land before it could reach further downstream water collection.
  • Other experiments have identified fungal species that may be able to decontaminate soil containing PAHs (Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons), a by-product of plastics production which is a carcinogenic that can harm human health. Researchers have also been experimenting with fungi that have shown the ability to degrade certain kinds of plastic products, leaving behind a bio-matter that can be more safely disposed of.
Plastic spoon treated with the mycelium of a white-rot fungus, a decomposer. The remaining bio-mass no longer contains toxic chemicals. Photo: Officinia Corpuscoli
  • Experiments have been done to see how fungi might be used in cleaning up things like oil spills and found them to be faster and more successful than more conventional clean-up methods. In an experiment on a pile of diesel contaminated debris the fungi succeeded in breaking down the hydrocarbons, absorbing it and rendering it harmless, sprouting mushrooms which produced spores, attracting insects, then the birds which came bringing seeds, and in a short period of time a healthy ecosystem began to develop on what had once been a toxic mess.
  • Experiments in using fungi’s enzymes to break down industrial waste from bitumen (a semi-solid form of petroleum) mines, now stored in toxic tailing ponds, and have had encouraging results on a small scale. A biodegradable mat called MycoMat was inoculated with oyster mushroom mycelium and then rolled onto tailing ponds or surrounding soil. The mycelium release enzymes that tests showed can digest and eliminate the hydrocarbons in contaminated soil in only 21 days. The problem these tests are looking to solve is huge. Every barrel of bitumen extracted from the oil sands result in 1.5 barrels of tailings waste that requires indefinite containment from the risk of leaching into surrounding soils and contaminating ground water. Managing tailings waste is one of the most difficult environmental challenges facing the oil sands industry to put it mildly. The containment ponds are leaking.
Alberta Oil Sands. Tailings ponds are often very close to the Athabasca River. The Commission for Environmental Cooperation report includes information from Syncrude that estimates approximately 785 million litres of tailings fluid “migrated” past collection ditches in 2017. Photo: Alex MacLean

So far, these are limited small scale experiments with intriguing results but this is where the human imagination can go nuts on future possibilities to help clean up the overwhelming pollution we have produced on this planet. I applaud all the brilliant minds turning their attention to novel solutions. That’s on a good day. On another day I despair that it’s all too late. Hmmm. Best to choose it to be a good day.

Nonetheless, as intriguing as these early days experiments are, we may still be pretty far away from anything close to being scalable in nature to deal with this mess. I too have an imagination when I think about unintended consequences – and humans have been notorious for mucking about using one species of something or other to solve a problem caused by another species that turns out to be the makings of an even bigger problem. Perhaps it’s wise to pay attention to the quirky little 1967 tune from Dr. West’s Medicine Show & Junk Band, The Eggplant That Ate Chicago paraphrased:

You’d better watch out for The Eggplant (Mushroom) that ate Chicago

For he may eat your city soon

You’d better watch out for The Eggplant (Mushroom) that ate Chicago

If he’s still hungry the whole country’s doomed

Then there’s the Big Daddy of human industrial waste production – nuclear. After 80 years, over 250,000 tons of nuclear waste sits stored at power plants around the world, piling up with no immediate global solutions in sight. (Exception – Finland is soon to complete the world’s first permanent disposal site for high-level nuclear waste, a project that will bury it 430 meters (1400 feet) into the Earth’s bedrock where it needs to remain undisturbed for 100,000 years.)

In Chernobyl, five years after the 1986 nuclear disaster, robots sent inside the toxic radioactive reactor showed that a jet-black fungus was growing on the inside walls, already doing its thing, attracted on its own to the radioactive material inside (yummy), using it as an energy source and growing.

The man-made solution – containment until we figure out what to do with it. This new sarcophagus (replacing the original, hastily built structure) is designed to last 100 years. The fungi solution – find it, “eat” it, and thrive.

Around the site, in the contaminated soil, significant amounts of radioactive particles have already been decomposed by soil fungi and over the years new trees and vegetation have grown and birds and wildlife have returned. But they’re not out of the woods (ha) yet, it’s a long term process. Measured radioactive levels have shown recent elevations due to soil disturbance by the Russian army’s invasion and capture of the area (they’ve left as of now).

Chernobyl city – 30 years later when the people had gone. Forests have returned.

The research and inventive applications of mycoremediation are really interesting, and could provide some good solutions to various problems. It’s in its infancy and so far, not yet scalable to make much of an immediate dent on some of the pressing environmental problems we face. Still, we absolutely need small scale, local imaginative solutions as well, and lot’s of them.

The fungi timeframe is not the human timeframe. We humans don’t have much time left to solve the problems we have created. Fungi have been around for a billion years and survived 5 previous extinctions on this earth, adapting and laying the groundwork (literally) for other life forms to emerge and populate a new earth. This gives a hint how the mess we’ve made will eventually get cleaned up, long after humans are gone. Fungi will “eat” it.

Next: Speaking of mind blowing – magic in the mushrooms

Fantastic Fungi Part 1

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For some time now I have been in the midst of a wonderful new (to me) exploration of a vast kingdom, whose species are greater in number than those of the plant and animal kingdoms, mostly unseen to the human eye, barely explored and a world that we walk over and past everyday without registering its existence. Fungi.

Although I’ve been photographing mushrooms in the forest for years now and enjoying their colours, textures and the delight of finding them, and although I was vaguely aware that below these visible fruits lay mycelium networks hidden below the surface of the earth I Had No Idea of what was really going on. Interest sparked by the Netflix documentary Fantastic Fungi, a film that makes “the invisible visible”, I have gone down the rabbit hole (perhaps pun intended) of this fascinating story of this world that is so complex and so key to life on this planet. This film is on the top of my Hot Tips list – the cinematography is amazingly beautiful and its stories are eye-opening, if not mind-blowing.

I’ve been reading everything I can get my hands on, books and articles, listening to interviews, watching other documentaries and generally having a fine time with those whose enthusiasm for the subject is contagious. People who work in the growing field of mycology are an interesting bunch.

Merlin Sheldrake in the introduction to his book Entangled Life describes this fascinating world :

“Fungi are everywhere but they are easy to miss. They are inside and around you. They sustain you and all that you depend on. As you read these words, fungi are changing the way that life happens, as they have done for more than a billion years. They are eating rock, making soil, digesting pollutants, nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions, producing food, making medicines, manipulating animal behavior, and influencing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere…Yet they live their lives largely hidden from view, and over 90% of their species remain undocumented.”

Here’s what I’ve been learning.

FUNGI 101

The mushrooms I’ve been searching for and photographing on my walks are only a tiny, visible part of the fungi kingdom.

All mushrooms are fungi but not all fungi produce mushrooms. Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of certain fungi that surface from underground to release the spores, carried away by wind and creatures to reproduce themselves. Only a fraction of the fungi species reproduce in this way, others have different ways of getting the job done. Fungi themselves are masses of long, thin filaments called “hyphae” and a collection of these hyphae in a single specimen are called “mycelium”. Fungi grow by lengthening and branching the hyphae – creating a vast network. When I stand on the forest floor, I am standing on these masses of entangled strands of mycelium that if stretched out would reach out for miles.

Scientists believe that there are probably millions of species of fungi on earth (estimates of plant species are 320,000-380,000 and living animal species number about 1,500,000) but only a fraction of that have been “discovered” and named and of these only a few tens of thousands produce the visible and easier to find and categorize mushrooms. New species are continually being added to the lists of what is known, as the field of mycology itself is growing.

Unlike plants, fungi cannot produce their own nutrition. Some obtain it from decaying organic matter (decomposers), some by growing on their host plant (parasites) in some cases harming them, some are predators of nematodes and bacteria, and some form partnerships with plants, getting their nutritional needs from them via carbon in the atmosphere in exchange for providing water and minerals from the soil.

THE WOOD WIDE WEB

This latter relationship has been revealed as one of the most fascinating areas of current research. The plant-fungus symbiosis (mycorrhizae) is one of the most common ways the two interact for their mutual benefit. Over 90% of plants take on mycorrhizal fungal partners and without them would stop growing or die. Without their plant partners, almost all mycorrhizal fungi will die. This inter-connected relationship is one of the most important in sustaining life on the planet.

In this relationship the plant produces sugars through photosynthesis and feeds the fungus through their roots. The fungus absorbs water and minerals and other chemicals from the soil and feeds these to the plants. A single tree can have several different fungus species partners and a single fungus can attach to the roots of numerous trees. This underground network of plant roots and fungi mycelium supporting each other has been called “the wood wide web”, and has caught the imagination of both scientists and popular culture (think of James Cameron’s movie Avatar and even Lord of the Rings}. What happens to one, affects all.

Image from The Fascinating Social Network of Trees by Macrina Busato in Medium.com

It’s been a few decades since the scientific research has been revealed that shows that it is cooperation not competition that drives the relationship between tree species in the forests where trees share nutrient resources with each other via fungi and the implications this has for forest management and clear-cutting and monoculture replanting practices. Industry and government policy makers have been slow to change, no surprise there. Interesting how vision clouded by attachment to old ignorance and pursuit of money keeps on keeping on.

As I walk in the forest now, my imagination is caught by the ground under my feet, as I think of all the action taking place there. When I look at the trees I don’t just focus on a single tree or an indistinguishable mass of them. Instead I think of how they are all connected, sharing nutrients and passing chemical signals between them all through these vast, mycelium fungal networks.

My neighbours have become used to seeing me wandering around with eyes lifted looking for owls. Now I’ve been caught in the act of bending on one knee, poking around on the forest floor, sometimes with flashlight in hand, searching for the pale, thin strands of mycellium in fallen tree trunks and limbs and the outward signs of hidden fungi – their mushrooms. It’s all there to find, if you look.

Next: Fungi decomposers and what happens when fungi meets human imagination

Braiding Sweetgrass

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HOT TIP: LITERARY EDITION

I read a book over the past months and when I (reluctantly) came to its end, I immediately turned around and started it again to read a second time, something I’ve never done before. It was that good. I’ve been thinking of where it rests on a personal top 10 list, no, top 5, no…it may be as of now my favourite read of all time. It is one of those books that I can say has shifted my world view in ways that are deep, exciting and even magical.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is an environmental biologist and professor at SUNY in upstate New York and a member of the Potowatami Nation of the Anishinaabe people. Her book is like no other – a complex mix of plant science, observations from the field, personal memoir, indigenous teachings and exploration of the wider connections between the environment and the way humans have connected with our world over time. Each chapter reveals how this natural world can only be understood in the context of inter-relationships between everything and the impact that humans have had on our environment. All is connected. She tells stories of how indigenous cultures and their ancient teachings reveal the interactions between humans and plants and brings to light what we can learn from those teachings. She recognizes that many humans do indeed love this earth but then asks the question, “does the earth love us?” Ah so.

The title comes from the indigenous practice of braiding the fragrant sweetgrass, a plant that holds a place in the culture in ceremonial and material ways, honoured as one of the four sacred plants of her people.

Hierochloe odorata, means “the fragrant, holy grass”. In the language of the Potowatomi it is called wiingaashk, “the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth”

She describes her intentions for her book in the Preface, using the imagery of braided sweetgrass combined with metaphors of medicine and healing:

I offer…a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world. This braid is woven from three strands: indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters most. It is an intertwining of science, spirit and story – old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other.

As well as being fascinating and unexpected, her writing is exquisite.

I just finished Braiding Sweetgrass for the second time. It rests on my bedside table. I’m not finished with it yet.